Thread: A little bit of bother but showing optimism

This is from Defender2. Someone having a spot of bother with the new Defender, but is confident it is just a one off of situation.
DEFENDER2.NET - View topic - If you want to go into the Australian Outback... includes photos. Here is the basic story.

"I sold my house last year and bought a Defender D300 SE so I could hit the road, live out of my car and work on a landscape photography book since covid had decimated my work as a music photographer and tour manager.

I made it all the way from Traralgon through the Victorian high country before breaking down for the first time 40 mins outside Byron Bay with error code P034. The car was towed to Gold Coast Land Rover who took TWO weeks to tell me there was nothing wrong with it.

Land Rover provided me a replacement car that couldn't even handle the potholes on the road we lived on.

A couple of months later a loss of power again, this time with no error codes. The car was taken to the Sunshine Coast to Pacific Motors. Over the course of 6 weeks they misdiagnosed it TWICE and then trucked the car back to me with a new error code after fixing the wrong part.

During this time LR put us in cars not large enough to carry the camping gear etc carried in the defender and so cheap that we were left in pain every day after long drives, don’t expect decent replacement cars if you break down in Australia.

Not having a 4wd also meant I couldn’t head to the places I needed to go to for the landscape photography, so more lost time and work. Because we couldn’t camp anymore LR had to pay for our cheap accommodation instead of just air freighting the part from Europe to the Sunshine Coast!! It cost them $5,480, took 6 weeks and I’m now a pretty Censored off customer. By this time my car was shipped to Cairns, I was reunited with it showing a new check engine light error!!

I was meant to head to work in the bush the next day, I took it to Trinity Land Rover who managed to diagnose the issue as the exhaust section of the throttle body and this time LR got the part within 24hours. This time I had to hire a camper van to head up to Cooktown so I could at least do some music photography work.

When we got back to Cairns, after repairing the car, they turned it back on and the ECU was dead.

Basically LR gave the dealer a long list of things to restart the ECU but in the end they just disconnected the battery and it came back to life. After taking the car out for short drives LR signed off on it and we proceeded to take the car up to Cape York on the Old Telegraph Track.

The car did amazingly on the corrugated roads, allowed us to cover vast distances in comfort, and performed really well on the OTT, leaving people watching in awe at how it could slowly crawl over any rutted out track or through Nolan’s Creek Crossing with ease. BUT the day after making it through all of that, across the Jardine River and setting up camp at the Punsand Bay Resort, we drove a standard gravel road 14kms to the Tip and just before the carpark at the most northerly part of Australia the car started overheating, spewing coolant everywhere and lit up with a seperate Electrical error.

We limped to the car park as the road was narrow and we needed to safely park. We decided to walk to the tip and leave the car to rest, when we got back and turned it on a Low Coolant warning, battery not charging turn on car warning appeared. I opened the bonnet to find all the coolant gone. Phoned LR for assistance and was told our only option was to have the car towed 1000kms to Cairns and for us to ride along in the tow truck on a 3-day drive across corrugated roads.

When the truck arrived 4 hours later the car didn’t have enough power to start the engine and be able to get the car into neutral and hand break off. Also every warning light came on from suspension to sos system. The tow truck driver also told me, they don’t tow cars back to Cairns, they put them on a barge, so I guess riding along in the cabin was never an option after all. After calling Melbourne LR for help, no one could tell roadside assistance how to bypass the electrical parking brake or put the car into neutral, so my car had to be dragged onto the truck with the wheels locked up, trashing my new and very expensive tyres, burning rubber and ruining my brake pads I’m sure!!

Now, we’re stuck at the tip with no car, no call back from LR, what seems like zero customer service, nowhere to live once our campsite, which is fully booked expires on Saturday and a whole lot of stress and upset, for what??? If anyone from LR head office sees this, feel free to call me because I’ve been waiting over 24hrs for a call back and a solution."

This is exactly the main reason we moved off to another brand after 20yrs of LR's,all bought new.

Although what also helped was there was not a model that we really liked,and suited our needs.

And this vehicle we now have has a dead easy way to get the vehicle out of park if the battery is flat,and its all explained in the vehicles handbook.

As is the way to get the rear tailgate set up open from inside,if the battery is flat.I dont think there is one LR that has this option.